The light from the south-west streamed into the little room and made it
golden. Everything in it shimmered and shone. The window, flung wide
open to the veranda, framed the green lawn and the shining, shimmering
sea. A wind, small and soft, stirred the thin curtains to and fro,
fanning the warm air. The sunlight and heat oppressed her. She shut her
eyes and put her hands over them to cool them with darkness. It was a
trick she had when she was troubled.

She sat by the window and waited in the strange, throbbing darkness of
hot eyes closed in daylight, a darkness smitten by the sun and shot with
a fiery fume.

They were coming now. She heard feet on the gravel outside, round the
corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling
footsteps at the door, and two voices shrill and sweet.

Robert came in first and the children with him. They stood all three on
the threshold, looking at her. Robert was smiling, but the little girls
(they were very little) were grave. His eyes drew her and she came
toward them as she was used to come to the things of her desire, swift
and shy, with a trailing, troubling movement; the way that he had seen
her come, swayed by the rhythm of impulse.

The children stood stock still as she stooped to them. Her fear of them
made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face
with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a
tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little
mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth touched it.

But little Barbara held out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see.
"Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles
in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a
divine superfluity of joy.

Robert stood looking down from his tremendous height at Barbara,
tenderly as one who contemplates a thing at once heartrending and
absurd. Then his eyes turned to Kitty, smiling quietly as if they said,
"Didn't I tell you to wait until you'd seen them?" Kitty's heart
contracted with a sharp, abominable pang.

Then Janey took the little girls to the room upstairs where their nurse
was. Barbara looked back at Kitty as she went, but Kitty's eyes
followed Janet.

"Robert," she said, "will she always look at me like that? Shall I never
know what she is thinking?"

"None of us know what Janet's thinking."

He paused.

"I told you we had to be very careful of h